Archive

I’ve been try­ing to get as many weird futures on the table as pos­si­ble because the truth is there are these sort of ubiq­ui­tous futures, right. Ideas about how the world should or will be that have become this sort of main­stream, dom­i­nat­ing ver­nac­u­lar that’s pri­mar­i­ly kind of about a very white Western mas­cu­line vision of the future, and it kind of col­o­nized the abil­i­ty to think about and imag­ine tech­nol­o­gy in the future.

Over the past cou­ple of years, it feels like civ­il soci­ety has been almost over­whelmed with promis­es of how tech­nol­o­gy can sud­den­ly mag­i­cal­ly solve the prob­lems that we’re try­ing to address. Some com­ing from tech giants who say they’ve devel­oped some sem­blance of social con­science sud­den­ly. Some from star­tups who see a prob­lem and think that tech­nol­o­gy can help with­out think­ing about the sys­temic issues under­ly­ing it.

I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned with how to design from the dystopi­an posi­tion of the Anthropocene. How to make cre­ative work that is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly crit­i­cal and gen­er­a­tive. What does it mean to have aug­ment­ed the atmos­phere and the ocean’s capac­i­ty to absorb heat? And to be rapid­ly increas­ing the entropy of those sys­tems?

During this year that I have been off I’ve been think­ing about how to teach both peo­ple who are trained in tech­ni­cal parts of data sci­ence, and also pol­i­cy­mak­ers, how we could have a com­mon lan­guage. And then that way we could have these con­ver­sa­tions so we could talk togeth­er.

My fel­low­ship project is to under­stand the devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of pre­dic­tive mod­els for decision-making in city and state gov­ern­ment. So specif­i­cal­ly I’m inter­est­ed in apply­ing and devel­op­ing sta­tis­ti­cal and com­pu­ta­tion­al meth­ods to improve decision-making in police depart­ments, in the courts, and in child wel­fare agen­cies.

The mythol­o­gy of genet­ic coer­cion is thoughts that genet­ic data, espe­cial­ly large-scale genet­ic data­bas­es, have the abil­i­ty to pin­point cer­tain risk of dis­ease. They pro­vide agency to act to pre­vent such dis­ease, and it can be used to cre­ate accu­rate per­son­al­ized treat­ment for dis­ease, and it should also be entrust­ed with the author­i­ty to dic­tate the mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the genome for future gen­er­a­tions.